TALLAHASSEE -- A Leon County judge has held three prominent Republican consultants in contempt for not handing over thousands of pages of private records detailing their work in last year's contentious redistricting fight.

Leon County Judge Terry Lewis had ordered Gainesville-based Data Targeting Inc. along with employees Pat Bainter, Matt Mitchell, and Michael Sheehan to produce the records last year in an ongoing legal battle between voting-rights groups that backed the 2010 Fair Districts reforms and the GOP-controlled Legislature.

The groups, including the League of Women Voters, have alleged in two separate lawsuits winding their way through the courts that the state Senate and congressional maps were still drawn to help Republicans hold onto their majorities, and the records they are seeking from Data Targeting will help make their case.

But lawyers for the company have called the efforts a "fishing expedition."

This week, the company handed over more than 1,800 pages of records, but filed a motion in Leon County Circuit Court on Thursday to keep them protected from public disclosure because they are "trade secrets" -- involving datasets and analyses of how legislative maps might perform in elections.

Because the political consultants aren't parties in the litigation, Bainter's lawyer argues the attempts to get them to hand over records is "intrusive, unconstitutional, burdensome and wholly irrelevant discovery in this case."

On Friday, Judge Lewis ordered the two sides to sit down with a another judge in private next week and start going over the records to decide whether any or all will be released to the plaintiffs.

Data Targeting lawyer Kent Safriet had argued the records in question pertained to internal discussions about how individual candidates would fare in elections if different drafts of new districts were ultimately approved -- but not communication between lawmakers and consultants, which could have influenced which maps were adopted.

"These communications between other non-legislative parties are not relevant," Safriet said.

Data Targeting worked closely with former Senate President Mike Haridopolos, who is a party to the lawsuit, the Republican Party of Florida, other consultants and GOP legislative candidates statewide whose districts were re-drawn last year. The lawsuits contend that GOP lawmakers still violated the 2010 Fair Districts constitutional amendments by gerrymandering districts to help Republicans and hurt Democrats.

The firm has already turned over some email of its communication with legislators and their staff -- another 166 pages this week -- but the plaintiffs in the case have issued subpoenas for internal communication and the judge in the case ordered them produced eight months ago.

"We're disappointed in so far as we believe the documents should have been produced immediately," Fair Districts lawyer Adam Schachter said after the hearing, in which he unsuccessfully argued for all the records to be immediately released.

"It's our belief these paid political consultants were working with the Legislature to draw the maps that became law. And we believe those maps violate the constitution."

The fight has produced some vivid examples of behind-the-scenes politics, shown legislative staff working with political consultants, and captured Fair Districts groups themselves drawing intentionally gerrymandered maps -- although they claim they were doing so to prove a point, while the GOP-controlled Legislature was passing theirs into law.

The contempt order means the Bainter and his company will have to pay the legal bills for the eight-month fight to get the records, which Schachter estimated to be "many thousands of dollars."

Also Friday, the Legislature filed a new brief arguing that the Fair Districts backers were just as guilty of gerrymandering, what's known as a "clean hands" defense based on the records showing Fair Districts organizers working with Democratic consultants to draw proposed maps that favored Democratic congressional members such as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston.

The Leon County lawsuit is slated to go to trial in August, although the Florida Supreme Court is still weighing whether to allow the challenge of the Senate districts to move forward. Last week, a divided appeals court ruled that legislators couldn't be put under oath in that case.